July 21-23: Tuscany 1

Tuscany: green undulating meadows, sunflower fields, giant bales of hay, cloudless blue skies, twisting country roads, castles, villas, wine, wild boar, porcini … the very best of Italian rural life. It would make a good backdrop for a movie.

We arbitrarily decided to commence our Tuscan adventure in San Gimignano, the medieval Manhattan. In earlier times the fortress village boasted over 70 huge towers. Now, only 13. In fact, San Gimignano’s greatest claim to fame is probably the guy who runs the village gelateria. He was part of Italy’s 2006 “World Champions Of Gelati Making” team. His establishment boasts written and photographic endorsements from Tony Blair, Thorpey, and Russian philosopher Oleg Solzhenitsyn. Needless to say, we visited several times. Despite not booking in the height of summer, the tourism office (conveniently located next to the gelati place) found us a room let out by an elderly Italian man who spoke no English and barely made it up the stairs of his own property.

Buoyed by the ease with which our adventure had begun, we set out the next day hoping for some beach-related activities. Mistake. The beaches were either hopelessly overcrowded or covered in dirty pale seaweed (which hasn’t stopped us before). Not only that, we found no accommodation despite 11 attempts. Dejected, we decided to try and head for a more remote location. We ended up in an industrial city/hole 50 km away, with the sun setting and no place to stay. Fortunately we discovered a no-frills hotel, and it was there that I realised I had left the camera uplink cable in San Gimignano. It was the culmination of a foul day, one that could not be rectified by watching Numb3rs in Italian.

The following day we decided not to take easy-to-find accommodation for granted any longer, and returned to little San Gimignano, and the world’s best gelati, where the elderly Italian man’s wife had faithfully kept my mysterious cable in her kitchen. We spent the rest of the day booking places for the rest of our spontaneous Tuscan adventure, and bludging in our new favourite Italian fortress village.